If you're near a nuclear disaster -- either a detonated bomb or a malfunctioning reactor -- you are probably going to die, and die unpleasantly. Unless the Pentagon's mad scientists have anything to say about it.
Darpa doesn't have a program in place for creating, say, a super-therapy or spray-on tan that stops nuclear radiation. But 2011's Fukushima Daiichi reactor catastrophe in Japan got the blue-sky researchers thinking.
"In light of the diverse, persistent, and substantial threat posed by ionizing radiation from nuclear and/or radiological weapons," the agency wrote in a request for information released Wednesday, "Darpa is requesting information on novel therapies, methods, devices, protocols, compounds, and/or systems to mitigate the dangers that ionizing radiation poses to human health." The idea is to help inform "a potential new program focused on demonstrating novel methods for mitigating the susceptibility of victims exposed to large doses of ionizing radiation over a range of temporal scales."
Darpa's breaking down its interest in nuclear survival into three main research areas. One is "prophylactic" and "post-exposure" treatments that can neutralize ionizing radiation before it starts to cause serious cellular damage. Another looks at how to survive and/or mitigate the long-term effects of radiation exposure, to include cancers -- effectively meaning Darpa wants to push the boundaries of surviving radiation-induced cancer. The third is to better understand and model the effects of radiation on the human body, from a molecular up to a systemic level, with an eye to "mitigation and repair of genetic and cellular damage."
A particular area of interest: what nuclear radiation does to the very building blocks of life. "Emerging models of DNA damage dynamics, DNA damage response, signaling pathways and DNA repair mechanisms," Darpa's request reads, "may lead to the development of novel therapies for long-term radiation damage."
Perhaps none of this research should come as a surprise, as it emerges from the agency that once dreamed of building a nuclear reactor the size of a microchip. And it's ambitious, to say the least. But Darpa will truly be doing something revolutionary if it can figure out how to make the human body resilient against nuclear energy or fallout.
